Robin is mad for migration
The cheeky robin bringing festive cheer to you and yours this Christmas is likely to be hiding a surprising secret.
Rather than being the same gardening companion quick to snatch a worm from the herbaceous border last summer, they may well be a freshly arrived traveller from behind the former Iron Curtain.
If I had a hot Christmas dinner for every time I’ve been told about “pet” robins becoming as much a garden fixture as red-faced gnomes, I’d be as portly as the nation’s favourite bird.
Explaining why the robin coming to bird feeders in December is highly unlikely to be the same one that poured out its silvery song and raised young in spring, always brings a look of astonishment to gardeners’ faces.
Fortunately, the mind-boggling nature of robin migration has been unravelled by the dedicated band of bird ringers providing data to the British Trust for Ornithology.
By fitting tiny metal bands to robins’ legs over many decades, this volunteer army of citizen scientists has charted the incredible journeys of a species we see as quintessentially British.
Recoveries show how robins ringed in the UK have travelled as far away as Morocco, Poland and Jan Mayen Island, an outpost well inside the Arctic Circle. Similarly, birds originally ringed in Estonia, Lithuania and Russia have made it to our shores.
By far the most frequent robin routes are between the UK, Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Some robins do not head overseas but migrate within the UK. Oddly, the longest living robin spent its entire life in Blackpool during the 1970s.
The BTO’S Paul Stancliffe explains: “That we can today understand the robin in our garden this winter might not be the same one as we saw during the summer, and that it might have travelled a long way to get here, is testament to the huge amount of effort bird ringers, often in their own time and in a voluntary capacity, have put in over the years.”
Robins from the UK have been found in Morocco, Poland and the Arctic